Justin Trudeau: Alberta’s new bogeyman

Yes, Justin can grow a foolish mustache, or a pirates’ beard, and his picture will brocade the screens of 100,000 Twitter feeds. He walks into a room and fans sweep over to clasp his hand.

But Fame’s siren amplifies less happy moments, too. Mr. Trudeau learned that this Grey Cup weekend, as he traveled to Calgary. Journalists revisited an interview from two years back, where he speculated with philosophic hauteur on the nature of “Alberta” and its (to him) mainly negative and regressive role in Confederation.

Said the young prince in that rediscovered video clip: “Canada isn’t doing well right now because it’s Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn’t work.” Wow.

The real butter on the contentious popcorn was when he added that Canada has been “better served when there are more Quebecers in charge than Albertans.”

Let’s load up on Quebec prime ministers, in other words. Can’t be too many of them.

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How such disparaging remarks will contribute to a “less divisive” Canada — one of Mr. Trudeau’s high themes as he seeks the Liberal leadership — is a puzzle for hungry Jesuits to unravel. Sounds more like a slur against a region of the country to me.

Till Mr. Trudeau’s ruminations made the front pages, I thought the McGuinty brothers, outgoing Ontario premier Dalton and his brother David, were the national leaders when it comes to side-jabs at Alberta. Just this week, David, the Liberal Ottawa-area MP, resigned his critic’s post after telling reporters that Alberta’s Conservative MPs “should go back to Alberta and run either for municipal council in a city that’s deeply affected by the oilsands business or go run for the Alberta legislature.”

All of this cuts squarely across the newly-minded accommodation with the West that Mr. Trudeau has been sounding in his speeches, and his condemnation of the NDP as a party that “plays one region of the country against another.” Thomas Mulcair has got the first and best of all the Christmas presents he will receive this year.

This places Mr. Trudeau, at an early and inauspicious time, squarely in the tradition he wanted to overwrite: that of his father’s unhappy, voteless and sometimes contemptuous dealings with Western Canada. People on the Prairies are going to hear the son’s words, but they will shiver at the father’s memory.

Mr. Mulcair, Mr. Trudeau’s real, immediate opponent, had early on upset some of the West with his remarks about Canada’s allegedly oil-engendered “Dutch Disease.” But since then, Mr. Mulcair has been in Alberta, and taken on a very congenial matter, and moderate tone, when discussing that province.

In politics, it’s good to have your head well above the high grass, but it should never, ever, be in the clouds. That’s where Justin’s was when he gave the interview that he now, no doubt, very much regrets.